The Post Money Value

VC Roundtable - Full Schedule

[Updated to add Guelph on the 28th]

Here is the full schedule the VC roundtables.  We've got some additional locations I will add in May (Kamloops, Saskatoon, etc) but I wanted to get this list finalized so people would know.

Notes:

• There is a limit of 25 seats at each session.
• The times are firm but the locations are still being finalized
• You must register at the event links below so I can email you the final location.
• This is for entrepreneurs, you, not for me so come with questions!

[Drum roll...]

April 14th – Halifax  (8a – 10:30a) Sign up here

April 14th – Moncton ( 5p – 7p) Sign up here

April 15th – St. John’s (5p – 7p) Sign up here

April 16th – Ottawa  (10:30 – 12:30) Sign up here

April 16th – Montreal (4:30p – 6:30p) Sign up here

April 17th – Toronto Morning (8:30 – 10:30) Sign up here

April 17th – Toronto Afternoon (4p – 6p) Sign up here

April  21st – Victoria (8a – 10a) Sign up here

April 21st – Vancouver (4p -6p) Sign up here

April 22nd – Edmonton (8a – 10a) Sign up here

April 22nd – Calgary (3:30p – 5:30p) Sign up here

April 23rd – Regina (8:00a – 10a) Sign up here

April 25th – Winnipeg (noon – 2p) Sign up here

April 28th - Guelph (4p - 6p) Sign up here

If you would like to link to the full list you can use this post or this link from eventbrite.  Please get the word out.

 

A second set of cities will be set up for May.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Tags: VC Roundtable,start-up,Canada

So THAT'S what it feels like

Doc Searls told me to wait before buying a MacBook Pro because new models were coming around the corner. He was right, I waited, and now I have a shinny new laptop compliments of the Apple store in Toronto. Last night, I needed to stop by and pick up a copy of Office for the Mac so I could start doing some business work on it. I zipped into the local Staples store.

Me: "Where's the Mac software?"
Him: "Why?"
Me: "Funny. I need to buy a copy of Office for the Mac."
Him: "I think Microsoft stopped making that in the nineties or something."
Me:  [restraint] Yeah, well, I think not, but thanks, later.

So, that's how the Mac users feel; that just blows. I ended up getting a copy over at a little store in Aurora, Ontario which caters just to Apple owners.

[Bonus Mac Commentary] After getting home, I realized I had bought the student/home edition. Good news, three installs, bad news, no Exchange support. Growl.  Well, my hosting provider has the 2004 version of Entourage that you can download and use with their service.  So, I install the Mac Office 2008 product, no problem.  I remove the Entourage Icon from the dock. I download Entourage 2004 from the Apptix site and install it. I then drag the Entourage 2004 Icon onto the dock. So, presto, change-o, I have 2008 for all products except Entourage which is 2004.  Not a big deal, you likely say, you can do this with PC Office.  While true in the software will run okay category, I must tell you there is a certain feeling of ease and almost magic when you just drag simple Icons around and stuff just works. I had the Entourage install as a sub directory of the download folder by mistake, oops.  I just dragged the whole thing to the Applications folder. Done. The Dock's Entourage Icon?  Doesn't care it just launches Entourage.

[Bonus Outrageous Suggestion] I'm not trying to sound like some Mac groupie. I started life on an Apple ][. I still know some 6502 programming.  Having said that, here's my suggestion if you are delivering software or a web service.  Get a Mac or get somebody that lives on a Mac involved in your project.  The stuff just works and, as I said, there is a certain sense of satisfaction you can deliver to your customers by emulating much of this "it just works" magic.  I know, it sounds all groupie like but if you'd like to see real magic happen in a grand scale, the Microsoft Mac Applications Team should be put in charge of all Microsoft application development.  Okay, I'm done as I have to install Windows Live Write in the Parallels world as I can't find a blog writing tool even close.

Xobni: Sending out the love

When you get a really good response to a post, I believe it deserves the top level attention that the original post got and not just a comment buried away.  So, in that spirit, I'm 'promoting' the blog comment I received from Jeff Bonforte, CEO of Xobni in response to my Tone post.

It's a long, but well thought out comment.  Just for the record, it's a great product that I find very useful. Thanks for stopping by, Jeff, I'm feelin the luv.

(Memo to Albert: Pay attention, he's younger than you. ;-) )

------------------------------------------------

Hello Rick: I am the CEO of Xobni. Thanks for the post. A few comments:

1) Your point is valid and we will take a look at the tone of our support page. We take customer support very seriously. We have a full-time, dedicated in-house support team, which is not normal for a startup of our size. We use senior engineers (including the founders) to diagnose and fix customer issues. We even invite in customers from the bay area to our offices to work on issues, or we use WebEx with more remote customers.

We respond to every email we receive in hours not days (we sometimes come up short here on a heavy support days). And the tone of our support pages *should* reflect that commitment, of course. Good catch. Bad on Xobni.

2) Love! You will even notice little heart shaped clouds in the sky on our home page! We love our customers and their inboxes...I wish all email vendors obsessed over a more productive and powerful inbox as we do. That is love!

3) Spam? I disagree here. Please remember that this is a limited, invite-only beta in the true sense of the word...I know "beta" has lost its meaning thanks to Google and even Flickr who stayed in Beta for over two years and eventually poked fun at themselves with a "Gamma" release! When you are in the Windows XP + Vista desktop software business a beta is very critical. Browser diversity is nothing when compared to OS + plugins + apps diversity. It is orders of magnitude more complex. Throw in Outlook, which was never properly engineered for real powerful plugins, it is even more critical. So when a customer joins an invite-only, closed beta like ours, they are actually making a commitment to give us feedback; to join a conversation with us to help improve the product.

As such, we do email a tiny number of customers every day with requests for specific feedback, and the vast majority of them happily oblige (which is an incredible testimony that our customers like the product enough to spend a few minutes or even hours with us). We reach out to customers all over the globe to jump on WebEx sessions with us so we can share their screens to look at bugs or issues. We have brought in tens of customers into our offices, even executives at Fortune 500 companies, to sit down and spend time with us to review the product. This is not a PR beta...this is a real beta.

If people don't like to talk to the company whose beta they are using, particularly a limited, invite-only beta, they should probably wait for the GA. So while we used standard web legal language for opt-out communication (bad on us), that opt-out is critical for us during our limited beta to engage in that conversation that is needed to make great, fast and stable software for the desktop. As we leave the limited beta, and probably the next beta phase, we will reexamine our customer communication policy.

And we will take a look at the language immediately (though with install software, unlike web pages, even minor fixes can have a much higher price QA testing price to spin out a new build release). I think our customers would tell you, we don't spam. We don't blast out notes weekly or monthly. We contact people very rarely and only when it is critical to the operation of the product, and therefore their inbox. If more companies followed our standard, a far higher percent of customers would opt-in to communication preferences, I suspect.

I might suggest another post topic...while i have your attention. "RIP the Beta. We Will Miss You". Discuss how companies have abused the word beta so badly that it has lost its meaning and responsibility for company and user. Beta is not an excuse for sloppy code, or a way to buy time while you wait on your new servers to arrive. It should be a time-limited commitment from company and customer to enter dialog of rapid feedback and improvement to summit to that high-ground called General Availability software release. *stepping off pulpit* Thanks for listening to my rant and for your post.

Your points are well taken. Feel free to contact me with specific feedback going forward about the product or the company. with love, ;) Jeff Bonforte CEO, Xobni

 

Technorati Tags: Xobni,start-up

Great Quote

My friend and investing buddy over at Edgestone Capital, Michael Hollend, had a great observation as we discussed a potential investment together.  We were reviewing time to market, plans, expectations, etc.

"Elapsed time is a start-up's greatest enemy"

We (and you!) have to balance between elapsed time and getting the product/service out the door.  Do you get V1 out the door feature incomplete or wait. There are risks in all of these strategies.

With six meetings packed into today, this quote was an interesting thing to have running in the back of my head. Some (2) of the teams were clearly trying to move like crazy.  When I started to ask "what about..." next release was the comment and  in the case of a web lending service, "we can do that after we have the first round of customers because nobody will care at first. By the time they are at caring stage, we will have that feature." 

Both were not blind to the impact of bad/grossly incomplete releases and both were struggling to find that balance.

Hopefully, as you roll out your next cool thing, you can find the right balance.

Tale of two sizes

[Long story but has a point for your start up]

Photoshop. A great product and worth every penny I've paid for it.   Recently, I've gotten really aggressive about getting better at using it. I've been on some amazing trips over the years and have finally started to take this Photo hobby seriously.  I have two Macs. I have an iMac all decked out with the maximum RAM possible, big hard drive, secondary drive, etc.  I also just bought a new MacBook Pro, again, with the larger hard drive and max RAM memory.

When I am on the road or watching TV, etc, I want to practice things like color correction or grabbing layers and putting my dog on a surf board riding the waves in front of the Eiffel Tower.  The point of this practice is to get super good with the tools so on my Iceberg or Sea Lion photos, I can really make them look their best.

I sent a note to Adobe's support group which, after the praise, etc, had this paragraph:

"I want to find out if it is okay to put the Photoshop CS3 I've upgraded to on both my MacBook Pro and my iMac. As I said, I'm not doing anything iMac other than fooling around/practicing, I do all the real work on my desktop machine. Think of it as like solitare on the iMac, just a practice effort."

I got, after a week, a response which, among other things said:

"Photoshop is licensed per copy and as such we expect you to adhere to the terms of the agreement associated with the product."

Nice, eh? Keep in mind I also own a PC copy of Photoshop, own Photoshop Elements (Mac and PC), and could find a bootlegged key on the Internet in about 3 seconds, if that long.  I told them about the other copies, just so you know.  As you can see, not exactly helpful. Email deleted and I'll futz with Elements.

Now, let me point out the case where there is a $75 plug-in which does some really nice touch up.  As a test of sorts, I sent pretty much the same note to this company. Three people, I believe but don't know for sure.

The response after 3 hours:

"Well, the key you activated [] with will activate that same D/L you have on another machine. We weren't that sophisticated about it and while we're okay with you doing it (thank you for the kind words), please keep this private as we are small and don't want people knowing the key thing doesn't phone home, do IP or MAC address stuff, etc. We'd prefer not to get ripped off and our piracy rate is -we think- low. So, go have fun just shhh about it. ;-)"

So, I'm keeping them out of the story and I sent them another $75 just because they were so nice/personable about it.

There is the great start up/small business versus big lumbering bureaucracy lesson in all of this for you.

I'd spell it out but I'm sure you clearly see it.

Tone - It really is important (Xobni)

I'm currently using Xobni with Outlook. For the most part, it does what it says it will do. For me, Xobni searching is great as I've never been able to get Google's desktop search to properly work with archived email.  Judging by various forums out there, I am not alone.

Today, I've found a weird artifact that I'm fixing to report.  Here is a screen shot from the Xobni support page:

This sets tone.  Consider this from Apptix, the exchange hosting company we use.

The different is is subtle but important, in my view. 

Xobni says, in effect, go dig around and if you still can't figure it out, yeah, flip us the problem.  Apptix had me go through the problem in a somewhat structured 'build a ticket' way and, just before sending it off, suggested some possible solutions/answers.  The flow is better, some level of help is attempted instantaneously and it just (in my view) is more polished and sets better tone of who I'm dealing with.

Some will argue I'm reading the 'tone' in the Xobni wrong or that I'm being too harsh.  That would be the point.  People will read it wrong, especially newbie types.  Given that Xobni is one click away from being dropped off my desktop in favor of the next search/Outlook utility, I believe Xobni has to go the way of Flickr.  If you will recall, it was Flickr who really went nuts with the love on pages and, even today, still does the international hello messages upon log in. Some would say back then, they started all the cutesy/cheeky pages and tone.

Today, in my view, the tone of a company is her web site and the interaction pages with the customers. Helpful, friendly, caring, (ahem) showing the love, etc, can make all the difference when yet another free competitor comes along. 

As you work on your start up, look at your web site. Have others who are new, old, young, and (surprise) cranky, give you feedback.  Go overboard because apart from being insanely useful, this is the only way to get loyalty.  This loyalty is, potentially, one of your most valuable assets.

Apptix, when you submit a ticket, says thanks and they will contact you within 2 business days.

Xobni, when you submit a ticket, says thanks and they will get back to you if it is required and when they can.

Check your site's tone, it really is important.

 [Bonus Xobni Item:] 

  David is supposed to be the UI Ninja at Xobni.  Well, David, you might want to take a look at this item as well.  I thought young, fresh, new companies moved away from sneaky Spam creation. I thought we were leaving this stuff behind. Not, it appears, at Xobni.

This is a screen shot of the bottom of the help page. Note that the check box was checked by default.  Personal Foul, Xobni, 15 yards, still first down.

Technorati Tags: Xobni,start-up

Reminder: Canadian Innovation Exchange Entries

The Canadian Innovation Exchange is still accepting applications to present.   You can click here to get the application process started.

Beside the Canadian Venture community, there are a number of U.S. Venture firms that will be in attendance.  This is a great opportunity for you and your company to get some good exposure and possible funding.

See you there.

Start-Up Metrics: Slide Show

Ignore the really goofy and distracting pirate nonsense (am I just getting too old for this stuff?).

Via Rob Grady's blog (thanks, Adam), Dave McClure relives his childhood but has a good panel about start-ups and the metrics you should know/follow. This is from SXSW.  Some of the slides are really really hard to read but if you are interested, all the contacts are inside the deck.  Worth a quick scan as there is some great stuff in here.

 

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Technorati Tags: SXSW,start-up

True Story: This is gonna be painful

Here's a surprise: There isn't a current version of Internet Explorer for the Mac.  Okay, so I'm a little behind on the Mac stuff.  I loaded up Firefox and I'm off to the races.

So, here I am out in the Internet looking for a particular plug-in for Photoshop.  I've got this amazing new Epson Printer (Stylus Photo R1900) which enables me to print the larger format paper. I'm now cleaning up and enhancing some photos worthy of this printer.

I wander over to a company called AVKIS who makes some great image processing tools (plug-ins).  On many of the product pages, they send you to a tutorial which gives you a step by step of how a particular product works.

On one such page, there is a picture which a note to click on the picture to get a larger view. 

I do it and get the following pop up over the other web page:

I take a look and then want to close this window.  See the X in the right hand corner? Right. I click on it. And click. And click. WTF!! Stupid Firefox locks up! JEZZZ.. Oh, wait. It's that other LEFT hand 'x' in the bubble which closes the window; that big X is part of the screen shot from a Windows app.

Learning curves, I just love em.

NDAs - Repeat After Me

All together now:

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs for first looks/meetings.

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs with promises not to evaluate the same or similar businesses included.

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs with 5 year no contact clauses included.

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs with promises to report any contact with competitive businesses included.

 

So far this year (and we're only half way through March), I've had requests for 35 NDAs, many including the weird clauses above.

And the best for last.  Repeat this 10 times before you go to bed tonight:

I will not send an unsolicited beautiful leather bound binder with 600 hundred pages of detailed business, marketing, competitive, and financial information about my business along with an unsigned NDA and a request for it to be signed and returned to any VC.

It arrived in my office on Thursday and the binder was off the charts nice.